“Today? He presented himself as … ?”
“He said repeatedly that the visit was social. But it felt prosecutorial.”
“He didn’t suggest to you that you might wish to have an attorney present?”
“As he was leaving he mentioned that he thought I should consider including my lawyer the next time I hear from him. He implied there would be a next time.”
“He said those words?”
“I’m not quoting. But yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “No Miranda?”
“No.”
“No witness to the meeting?”
“I don’t have a receptionist.” She’d been my patient. She knew that.
“The alleged evidence tampering? It was something that took place in your office the morning Lauren was shot?”
“Yes.”
“By you? Is that a safe assumption?”
“That was his insinuation.”
I could see her weighing my answer in her head. She looked at her watch. She dug into her purse before she attached a device the size of a big sugar cube to the top of her mobile phone. “Do you have a credit card with you? Personal? Not business.” I handed her a card from my wallet. She slid it through the device and pecked at the screen.
“You just gave me a small deposit on a legal retainer. I have a digital record for the transaction.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want you to be my lawyer. I need a friend. Some guidance. Maybe some reassurance.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to be your lawyer. But if I am going to be able to avoid becoming part of whatever problem you’re having, I need to hear the story about what happened between you and Mr. Bellhaven in confidence.
“I don’t wish to be compelled to testify in the future about this discussion. You and I have a choice to make about how to maintain privilege. I can think of only two options. Either you become my client—thus the retainer—or I become your patient. Do you have a preference?”
That was a no-brainer. “Retainer it is.”
“I’m pleased. I promised myself I would never go back into therapy.”
I began to speak. She held up a hand, interrupting me while she completed a call. The call was short; she requested that a taxi come to her house.
“That buys me a few minutes. I was going to walk to the Justice Center for a pretrial conference. The taxi will save time.”
I spoke nonstop for the next two minutes.
“Couple of things,” Kirsten said when I reached a place to pause. “We both know you’re not being forthcoming. Yes?” I nodded as I opened my mouth to explain my reticence. She stopped me. “I am making an assumption that what you’re not telling me leaves you even more vulnerable than what you are telling me.” Again, I began to respond. That time she stopped me with a traffic cop’s raised hand. “Assure me that what you have told me so far is true.”
“It is.”
“Elliot may well think that you’re hiding or withholding evidence—evidence that you have not specified—about what happened the morning Lauren was shot. The fact that Elliot is suggesting that, even obliquely, concerns you enough that it brought you to my door in a bit of a panic.”
“Pretty much. But the evidence Elliot was confronting me about wasn’t evidence about what happened the day Lauren was shot. The evidence Elliot was alluding to is about an old case, a different shooting. Elliot thinks I’m withholding evidence about that one. In a different jurisdiction. A death.”
“What kind of death? A homicide? Where?”
I shook my head as I nodded. “Weld County. Manner of death is suicide, though that determination may be under review. It could be homicide by now.”
“You know what you know … how?”
There wasn’t time to explain. I said, “From Lauren.”
“That morning? She told you then?”
“Moments before she was shot.”
“Did her shooting have anything to do with what she told you?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Elliot knows all this, too?”
“I’m not clear what Elliot knows. He does not know what Lauren and I discussed that morning. Elliot doesn’t have all the facts.”
“But you—you personally—do know the things that Lauren learned in her meeting earlier the morning she was shot? Is that correct?”
“I may not know everything. But I do know things that I am confident that Elliot does not know.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because if Elliot knew what I knew, I would be in custody awaiting trial for that other death. And I would not be the only one arrested.”
She composed her eyes and mouth into a portrait of calm. “Answer this next question cautiously, please. Do you understand what I am saying?” I nodded. “Do you have any personal knowledge that might lead you to a conclusion about which manner of death determination—suicide or homicide—would be closest to the truth for that earlier serious crime?” We both reacted to the sound of a car horn in front of her house. “That’s my taxi.” She stood.
I stood, too. I said, “I do, Kirsten.” She nodded a solemn acknowledgment.
She hugged me in a way that brought our bodies into contact from thighs to cheek. She eased me out the front door. “We’ll continue this later,” she said. “I will be in touch with a time. In the meantime you speak with no one about this. You know how it goes—if you hear another word from anyone in Elliot’s office, even if it’s further condolences or a butt dial, I want to know immediately.” She locked the door behind us.
I said, “I’m sorry, one more thing. Quickly, I promise. Lauren left an envelope addressed to Elliot. My first reaction after he left today was to open it. Bad idea?”
“Maybe. If it’s addressed to him, but was in her possession when she died? Don’t open it. We’ll talk. I have one more thing I want to say, too. A suggestion?”
“Okay.”
“Have you thought about therapy? It helped me a lot during my dark times.”
I didn’t know if I was supposed to thank her for that compliment. I didn’t feel complimented; I felt criticized. I said, “I’m in therapy. Gone a couple of times. Three.”
“Is it helping?”
“I don’t think I’m a very good patient.”
She smiled. “Give it a fair try. Who knows, you might find someone special, like I did.”
We descended the walk. I put my hand on her arm as we neared the taxi. “Have you heard from Carl Luppo?”
She made a face that I couldn’t interpret. She said, “I have to run.”
I thanked her before she jumped into the cab. The car made it no more than fifty feet before it came to a sudden stop. Kirsten ran on her toes back to where I was standing in front of her house. She stood close to me, all of her attention on my eyes. I couldn’t tell if she saw what she was hoping to see.
“So you know,” she said, finally—she was more breathless than the short jog should have left her—“I am seeing someone.” She squeezed my hand and turned.
I held on to her hand to keep her from running. “Are you happy?” I asked.
“Getting there, Alan. Dry ice, you know.”
I know all about dry ice, I thought. Sublimation. I’m getting to know it all over again.
I WENT BACK TO my office. I could barely keep my eyes open. I took a throw pillow from the sofa and I fell asleep on the floor.
For some reason I could sleep where Lauren was shot, even though I couldn’t sleep at home, where we had lived together, and where she had died. The last thought that rumbled around in my consciousness before I found sleep wasn’t about Lauren or Izza or Kirsten.
It was about Elliot’s latest maneuver and how it could complicate things for me with Sam Purdy.
I was beginning to get an uneasy sense that Sam had begun to think of himself as the one of us with clean hands.
<
br /> Oh boy.
25
SAM AND I DIDN’T SPEAK for the next two weeks. We exchanged waves across the lane. Each day of silence increased my anxiety about the state of our friendship.
Our next contact did nothing to allay my concerns.
Sam answered the pay phone after the first ring. He’d already called me three times, hanging up the first two. He left a coded voicemail with the third.
“My heart is pounding. What’s wrong?” I asked. We had agreed to the cumbersome emergency contact system back when Lauren was still in the hospital. We’d also agreed to use it only if something felt urgent. This was the first time either of us had used it.
“Just news,” Sam said. “Took you long enough to call me back. I walked over to Community Hospital for the pay phone. Place feels like it’s teeming with SARS and MRSA and Legionnaires’. I’m glad they’ll be knocking most of this place down soon.”
Legionnaires’? “How bad is the news?” I asked. The silence on my end of the line was the kind that crackled with fragments of other people in other places. I heard a woman’s voice say the phrase “probably the best that we can do.”
“Why does it have to be bad?” Sam asked. “Doesn’t matter, I need some context about one of our adversaries. This an okay time?”
Our adversaries. That meant either Michael McClelland, or … Huh. Maybe it was Big Elias, Elias Tres’s grandfather. Or the Weld County district attorney. He was always a potential member of our adversaries club. After the encounter I’d had with Elliot a couple of weeks before he was definitely on my enemy roster, but I didn’t see any reason he would be on Sam’s. I said, “I have a few minutes.”
“Tell me something, was our DA out of the closet in 2001?”
I’d been waiting on a Michael McClelland fastball. The Elliot slider tied me up, blew right by me. The anonymous conversation echoing elsewhere on the line filled the void. A woman said, “That one, really?” I found her comment to be ominous.
I had not told Sam about Elliot’s visit to my office. Why would he count Elliot Bellhaven among our adversaries? My suspicions about Sam, already on the rise, accelerated ominously. I finally said, “Elliot? Isn’t he my adversary? Not yours?”
“The enemy of my friend is my enemy.”
Bull. Shit. “Is that how that saying goes? Or did you just make that up?”
“Was Elliot out of the closet in 2001?”
“How is that relevant to anything? Whenever he went public with the fact that he was gay has to be old news. Decade-old news.”
“Humor me.”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t out when he first came to town. It’s Boulder, Sam. I don’t think he threw a party. People found out gradually. And they probably yawned. I don’t recall much controversy about it. People just began to accept that he was gay.”
“There were cops who thought it was a big deal.”
“Great. Maybe they can tell you when he came out of the closet.”
Sam said, “Listen, I’ve come a long way about this. From ‘queer’—not too long ago I used to say ‘queer’—to here, where I am today, is a long friggin’ way. Give me some credit for the ground I’ve covered about this thing.”
“It’s true, Sam,” I said. “But this is one of those races where you get the ribbon only when you cross the finish line.”
He said, “That’s probably true. Shit. Back to my question. Do you have a way to figure out when Elliot came out of the closet? Within a few months, plus or minus.”
“I could waste some time and try to piece it together. Why is this important?”
“Our mutual interest. That’s all I can say. And this, too: Why did Elliot come to Boulder County anyway? He was a hotshot, right? Ivy League, if I remember. Princeton? People like that don’t come here to be baby deputy DAs.”
“Elliot was Harvard, not Princeton. Princeton doesn’t have a law school. Lauren used to wonder why he chose Boulder, too, thought it might have something to do with how well he did or didn’t do in school. Or because he had political aspirations. But he never told her the reason.”
“Explain,” Sam said. “Pretend I don’t get it.”
“In Lauren’s frame of reference, Elliot either chose to come here for some career plan, or he ended up here because it was the best he could do because he screwed up in law school in some way.”
Sam said, “I’m interested. What did she decide?”
“I think she decided he thought he could raise a political tent in this environment faster than he could in some big city on the coasts. It worked. Elliot is a rising star.”
Sam harrumphed, acknowledging Elliot’s star without endorsing its ascension.
I said, “Look at Obama. He was president of the Law Review at Harvard. But when he left law school he turned down plum jobs to become a community organizer. He was playing the long game. He had his eyes on a bigger prize. Local power base to state politics to Congress to … It all worked out okay for him. Why not Elliot?”
Sam harrumphed again. “Can we not talk about Obama?”
“Yes, Sam, we can not talk about Obama.” As a general rule it was prudent for Sam and me not to talk about Obama. But it was also wise for us not to talk about gays and coming out. We were already in dangerous territory.
“Thanks. Wise of you to acquiesce. Will you check? Find out if Lauren’s speculation was accurate?”
“I don’t even know how I would do that.”
“It’s important. Could you try?”
“You still haven’t told me why it’s important.”
“I am not sure it is—yet. In my business I walk into dead ends all the time. This may be one. But depending on what the facts are, it may give us some leverage.”
Leverage? I was tempted to ask, but I feared revealing something if I did. “What’s your supposition, Sam? Something got you thinking about this.”
“It has to do with a case. A long story I can’t tell you.”
“I left the kids alone to make this call. I have to get back home.”
Sam said, “You should get a burner.”
“Do you have a burner?”
“I’m between burners at the moment. Soon I will have a new burner. That’s how burners work.”
26
THE NEXT MORNING BROKE bright and too warm for the first Wednesday in March. All the snow was gone from a rapid storm that had dumped six inches the weekend before. I got on my bike and rode east. I had a destination. And a task. Both were unusual for me those days.
During the time after the shooting but before Lauren succumbed to her injuries, I had ridden my bicycle a lot. I had convinced myself it would help me cope.
It didn’t. But it helped pass the time. On one ride I had dared to go near Frederick.
Frederick borders the east side of Interstate 25, north of Boulder County. The city of Boulder is far to the west of I-25. I didn’t cross under the highway on that ride. I stayed on the west side, the safe side, allowing the huge concrete edifice to protect me.
It was on the earlier ride, on a ranch near the road that could have taken me under the interstate into Frederick, that I saw the missing Tyvek for the first time. The jumpsuit was adorning a scarecrow in the midst of a circle of raised garden beds near a house on a farm. The crop growing in the fields, I thought then, was young winter wheat.
Until that day, Sam’s Tyvek jumpsuit—the one he had worn while he had killed the woman in the cottage in Frederick—had been a loose end about the crime. He had never told me the details about how he’d gotten rid of it, but he’d admitted that he’d disposed of it in a way that left him feeling vulnerable.
I was riding back to that farm to determine if the scarecrow was still wearing Sam’s Tyvek jumpsuit.
It was not. The scarecrow was still there, but it was dressed in camo, not Tyvek. The big sentry gripped a toy rifle in its upraised hand. I wondered if Sam had reclaimed his Tyvek. Or if the farmer had just moved on to a new seasonal look for his scarecrow.
I also wondered if Izza had seen the Tyvek at the farm and recognized the costume of the espíritu her nephew had immortalized in his memory during his meeting with Lauren. With every breath I took I was wondering if I could trust Sam Purdy.
My phone chirped while I straddled my bike on the shoulder of the road opposite the camo-clad scarecrow. Caller ID was from an unfamiliar area code. I said, “Hello.”
“It’s me. No need to say my name.”
The accent told me everything that caller ID failed to communicate about the person on the other end. I said nothing. Carl Luppo had that effect on me. I did the math. He had driven down my lane just prior to New Year’s. Almost nine weeks had passed.
“Your guy? The one who is not a friend?”
“Yes.”
“Found him. He’s not where you thought he was anymore. He’s gone, but good gone. Turns out he had a stroke.” Carl tried to swallow a cough. “You didn’t know?”
My heart added an extra beat. Or two. “A stroke? No, I did not know.” Then I asked, “Wait, is that a euphemism? The stroke?”
Carl Luppo responded with a rheumy laugh that degenerated into a coughing fit that sounded serious. “Happens. Not a small stroke. Word is he’s a sick guy. Got moved to a hospital in Grand … Junction. I got that right? Saint somethin’.”
“St. Mary’s,” I said.
“Yeah. Thought you could take some comfort that maybe he now knows what it’s like to wish he was dead.”
“God.”
“The finish? It’s easy, now. Hospital security? Amateur hour. You want to wake up with the nightmare over, you need to give me a sign.”
I was furious at the implication. Then I felt a surge of relief at the opportunity.
Just like that, I wasn’t furious anymore. I looked at the sky as though I expected to see God chastising me. Nothing. God didn’t seem to give a shit.
“Natural causes?” I said. “The stroke?”
“What else? Damn prison food, probably. Or karma. My daughter would say karma. She’s a Buddhist now. Not sure how I feel about that. We been Catholics”—it came out of his mouth as Cat-licks—“forever.”
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